Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By : John Horton, Paresh Mayani
Book Image

Android Programming for Beginners

By: John Horton, Paresh Mayani

Overview of this book

Android is the most popular OS in the world. There are millions of devices accessing tens of thousands of applications. It is many people's entry point into the world of technology; it is an operating system for everyone. Despite this, the entry-fee to actually make Android applications is usually a computer science degree, or five years’ worth of Java experience. Android Programming for Beginners will be your companion to create Android applications from scratch—whether you’re looking to start your programming career, make an application for work, be reintroduced to mobile development, or are just looking to program for fun. We will introduce you to all the fundamental concepts of programming in an Android context, from the Java basics to working with the Android API. All examples are created from within Android Studio, the official Android development environment that helps supercharge your application development process. After this crash-course, we’ll dive deeper into Android programming and you’ll learn how to create applications with a professional-standard UI through fragments, make location-aware apps with Google Maps integration, and store your user’s data with SQLite. In addition, you’ll see how to make your apps multilingual, capture images from a device’s camera, and work with graphics, sound, and animations too. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to start building your own custom applications in Android and Java.
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Android Programming for Beginners
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The capturing images mini app


Create a new project and call it Simple Photo. You can leave all the settings at their defaults as usual.

To handle Marshmallow runtime permissions, as discussed in Chapter 11, Widget Mania in the Android permissions and Marshmallows section, we need to set the target API to 22.

To do this, select Android from the drop-down list at the top of the project explorer. Now, double-click on the build.gradle (module: app) option from the bottom of the project explorer window.

Change the highlighted line of code so that targetSdkVersion is set to 22, as shown in the following code:

defaultConfig {
  applicationId "com.gamecodeschool.simplephoto"
  minSdkVersion 15
  targetSdkVersion 22
  versionCode 1
  versionName "1.0"
}

Now, we need to ask for the users' permission to use the camera.

Adding the camera permission to the manifest

The first thing we need to do is edit the AndroidManifest.xml file. The reason for this is that we need to ask the users' permission to access their...